If one day flood brings in a sad pantherand a shrine’s door,if they sew up a shirt with the panther’s skin,make a necklace with his teeth,I know that whoever puts on the shirtwill disappear,and whoever wears the necklacewould be obliged to carryher own head under her arms.

I take the shrine’s doorinstall it on the thresholdof my house. It creaks opento a circle of women,heads on knees,caressing their own hair.

Outside, body-less headssurround a fire with songs.I don’t recognize my own voiceand the door closes and opensto the rhythm of the words I grunt.

It is raining.A unclothed woman knocks on the door.She carries a boat on her back.I greet her between the panther’s roarand the door’s groans.Silently she unloads her boat in a corner,climbs in and falls asleep.

The house is in water.Water carries away corpses of women,it carries away the door,and my voice.

We paddle.We row looking for the voice.

My legacy is a door through whichwhen a woman enters or leavesmy voice cracks,and the house drowns in that alien sound.

Each time my bed is a boatto attract the nudity of a woman.A women’s nakedness is silent.It is wet.

I uproot the door,plant it on my rooftop.The wind blows.Guns appear on the threshold of the door.They point themselves at my throat.

The wind blowsand a thousand wounded panthersleap out from my mouth.I am naked.

An unclothed woman,wet,draws herself out from among the guns,kisses the door,kneels before me.Panthers leap out from her hair.

I caress your hair.The door will shut,voices and winds will pound on the door.I will not open.And the lost voice of the manwill become blood,will flood through the cracksand mingling with the rainthat will come pouring,it will flow through the city’s gutters and veins.I kiss youand my blood leaps out with every breath,out from my throat.It becomes my voice.

You are silent.You speak inside me.

There’s no one on the rooftop.I stand there, collect all the photographsthe shirts, the photos of a thousand hands holding guns,the portraits of women’s headsand the narrow stream of bloodthat flows on the paper’s edge.

I light a match,throw into fire the shirts and the papers.The fire has your shape.I want to touch your hair.I reach for youand become a poet.

I pick up my penand blood flows from my hand.The lines are your hair,in every line a panther roars.

**

On the balconyI fill my childhood cradle with soil,plant roses inside it.I water the roses,rock the cradle.The city is silent.

„Certainly, there are enough references to his obliteration in his journal in the months before he was found dead in the media room of his country house in Prud'homme, Connecticut, where he had been watching the miniseries of one of his novels, A Season in Purgatory. The book was about a rich young man who got away with murder because of the influence of his prominent and powerful father. Getting away with murder was a relentless theme of Gus Bailey's. He was pitiless in his journalistic and novelistic pursuit of those who did, as well as of those in the legal profession who created the false defenses that often set their clients free. That book, the miniseries of which he was watching, had brought Gus Bailey and the unsolved murder in Greenwich, Connecticut, which, to avoid a libel suit, he had renamed Scarborough Hill, a great deal of notoriety at the time of its publication, resulting in the reopening of the murder case by the police. Gus had fervently believed that the case remained unsolved because the police had been intimidated by the power and wealth of the killer's family, which extended all the way to the highest office in the land."It was exactly the same thing in the Woodward case," said Gus, who had written an earlier novel about a famous society shooting in the aristocratic Woodward family on Long Island in the fifties called The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. "The police were simply outdazzled by the grandeur of Elsie, whom I called Alice Grenville, and Ann Woodward got away with shooting her husband."As always, when Gus's passions were involved in his writing, he ruffled feathers. Powerful families became upset with him. He created enemies."You seem to have annoyed a great many very important people," said Gillian Greenwood of the BBC, as a statement not a question, in the living room of Gus Bailey's New York penthouse, where she was interviewing him on camera for a documentary on his life called The Trials of Augustus Bailey“.

„I will not expand on the desperate situation, in which Russia and the Russians found themselves as a result of the crisis in their history, which happened after 1985. This information is already known from numerous sources. But there still remains a shroud of secrecy over the fact that that situation did not happen merely as a result of untoward historical developments, but had been diligently planned by certain forces in the West and artificially imposed on the Russians. That condition is the consequence of one of the greatest tragedies in the social history of mankind. The tragedy which began in the mid 1980s may with high probability have a fatal end for Russia, but I do not count on my ability to turn the course of history and ward off this end. This may only be done by a great effort of millions of people, by persistent struggle and self-sacrifice. I am moved by the call of duty of a Russian person, who sees the tragic outcome of the Russian history and thinks it criminal to keep silence.Actual historical developments are always a combination of two processes: 1) 'elemental', unplanned and uncontrolled; 2) conscious-volitional, planned and controlled. Their proportions and roles vary with certain limitations. The domination of the second type will lead to a situation, when the general line of development is monitored, and only less important components may be out of control.

If we intend to give a scientific description of these processes, we will require quite different methodologies and sets of concepts. 'Elemental', natural processes are described with the concepts and postulates of dialectic. For the conscious-volitional processes we would need a different methodology, based on the knowledge of what social plans (projects) are, how and why they are created, how they are executed, and by what rules. Though this other methodology does not exclude dialectic, it implies an essentially different focus of attention while examining social objects.”